23. The Beach & The Desert
Show Notes
Big 3 Ideas from this episode:
Landscapes are the place of personal mythology
Inner to Outer: Sand Play, The Beach, The Desert
The Inner Journey often begins in real places, translated and transformed into art through the artist’s creative process to inner places.
Magdalena Abakanowicz, “Abakan - Situation Variable”
Frantisek Kupka, Sphinx, 1900, aquatint print
The beach and the desert are landscapes
of permanent impermanence.
We are reminded to the passing of time
by waves and wind.
Sand was once boulder and lava.
Water’s cyclical energy creates and destroys.
Willem de Kooning, Legend and Fact, 60 x 190 7/16 inches (4 panels), National Gallery of Art
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Episode 23: The Beach and The Desert
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[00:00:00] The Metaphor Mindset is a podcast for artists and creative thinkers, entrepreneurs and leaders who want to explore ideas around creativity and commerce.
[00:00:09] And this is episode 23, Beaches and Deserts.
[00:00:43] The poet Octavio Paz wrote "Beyond myself, somewhere I wait for my arrival."
[00:00:50] That line is perfect for today's podcast. I wanna talk about the journey of the creative self into two particular landscapes, the beach and the desert. The beach has its own wildness. All around the world, beaches are so different.
[00:01:05] Some are just sand. Some are different colors of sand. Some have a lot of boulders and driftwood, and some are wild cliffs with just a little string of beach at the bottom. Some are wide and miles and miles long, so beaches come in all shapes and sizes, They seem to represent a liminal space, meaning a space between two other places.
[00:01:31] For me, the beach represents kind of a stitching together of the unconscious or subconscious ocean and the reality of earth and the reality of the land and cultural and societal life. I live on an island, so I'm surrounded by beaches, but one in particular, South Beach at American Camp, which is part of the National Historical Park on San Juan Island is really special.
[00:01:56] It has been a place for centuries where, The native tribes would gather and fish on the salmon banks that are just out off the edge. And even now it has an ancient feeling. Many visitors come to the island. They go out to the beach and they build bonfires, and they also build shelters or structures or huts out of the driftwood. That's everywhere on the beach. These driftwood huts really seem to me like alters or shrines or temples, and it really brings into my mind the idea that this ancient place, Is a place where humans are drawn to, humans are drawn to the beach in order to look out at the ocean in order to contemplate their place, and also to kind of play out ancient rituals like fire and eating together and building shelter.
[00:02:51] But the beach also feels very abstract. The driftwood is just all sorts of lines and patterns. The horizon and the [00:03:00] hills and the light, the way that the light moves over this very blank landscape really. Gives you as an artist or as a viewer, a theater to look at.
[00:03:11] It's almost like a stage. And the stage is covered with lines and shapes, with forms and mass and volume with geometry and light and shadow. It's an incredibly interesting laboratory to look at as an artist, when the Impressionists started to paint outside, And started instead of painting the light and shadows and fabrics and silks and satins of the portraiture in the studio that they were painting previously, when they started to go outside and paint light and atmosphere, they were fascinated by the geometry. And the abstractness of the landscape as it changed through time, space, and light.
[00:03:53] So it feels like this place where we can kind of approach ourselves and go beyond ourselves. Like Octavia Paz said, beyond myself. Somewhere I wait for my arrival. It feels like there's always a version of me that's awaiting my arrival to the beach.
[00:04:11] This is one reason I think the surrealists were so fascinated with these landscapes and saw the beach and the desert As dreamscapes, strange and empty. Like the way psychologist Julian Jaynes describes how consciousness was formed.
[00:04:27] Evolutionarily, he suggests that early humans replicated the space we see and hear and experience around us. And created a space inside our minds so that we could walk around in it and create our own consciousness The desert serves this purpose well too, especially for the surrealist Remedios who painted dreamlike scenes.
[00:04:50] Many in the desert where imaginary versions of herself could act and live out. Strange scenarios of her imagination.
[00:04:57] She worked her dreams out on Canvas, acting out her own personal liberation. Frida Kalo did this as well. She said that she was painting her real life, but she painted it metaphorically dreamlike.
[00:05:10] Here's another quote from Octavo Paz. Surrealism is not a school of poetry, but a movement of liberation, A way of rediscovering the language of innocence. A renewal of the Primordial Pact poetry is the basic text, the foundation of the human order.
[00:05:28] Surrealism is revolutionary because it is a return to the beginning of all beginnings.
[00:05:34] This is what it feels like many surrealist painters do when they paint scenes of the beach and the desert while the beach is liminal time where. The waves come to the shore and are continually moving and beating out the moments and the cycles and the tides. The desert is constantly shifting,
[00:05:54] eroding, and changing, and there's a feeling that time stops that.[00:06:00] You can easily lose where you are.
[00:06:02] You can't place yourself in a landscape because the landscape itself is always shifting. One of my favorite painters. Paul Nash was an official artist during World War I and World War ii. During World War I, he had been injured. He fell into a trench and broke a rib, and during his recovery, he became an official artist for what was then the war propaganda department.
[00:06:26] He headed out to the home front to record it in drawings and paintings. But all he could bring himself to paint was the truth of it, which was very surreal. He painted the destruction of nature on the battlefield.
[00:06:38] When he returned, he spent much of his time at the cliffs and beaches of the areas where he lived, including Swanage painting dreamlike scenes. That can definitely be called part of his journey of healing. Where he processed the horrors that he had seen.
[00:06:53] The beach helped him do that. Although he struggled with PTSD his whole life, his painting was the way he expressed his emotions often through the stark landscapes of the beach and the healing that he found there.
[00:07:05] As artists often we live as much in our internal landscapes as we do in the external ones, and this can feel delusional, like we're spending too much time in our imaginations, but this really is how we process the world. As you navigate the different actions you take between creating art, trying to share it, to build relationships, to sell your work, to market it.
[00:07:28] And just be a productive member of a society, a community, or a family. Don't forget that your mind is where everything starts, your dreams and your imagination. This landscape is as important as the real world around you. Sometimes we need to be reminded of that.
[00:07:45] So what are the landscapes that inspire you if you focus on a certain subject or place? Whether that's the woods, the trees, water, mountains, with or without figures, animals, or even interiors or portraiture or still life. subject. think about what that subject mean to you? What are the metaphors behind the work you are creating?
[00:08:07] Often artist clients come to me and ask for help on how to talk about their work. Many artists think the work should speak for itself, and yes, it should. My thought is that art speaks. We listen and we can also continue the conversation with ourself, with our art, our mentors, and our inspirational artists.
[00:08:25] For instance, I can have a conversation with Paul Nash about his art by drawing something that I respond to in my landscape. We can connect with our collectors and community by delving deeper into the meanings and poetry of our art.
[00:08:40] And this process can only make us more wise, give more insight and inspire better work in the future.
[00:08:47] I hope you take time for yourself to do this, to explore the meanings of the landscapes and subject matter in your work. Write about it and share it with others. For myself, I soon will be experiencing a [00:09:00] shift in landscape. I will be taking a long road trip from San Juan Island to the Midwest where I've never spent much time to start an MFA program in painting at Southern Illinois University.
[00:09:11] I'm very excited and I'll be writing about it in my journal, drawing and painting this journey as well, to remember it and to grow. On my own creative path. So as this summer and fall progresses, my podcasting schedule may shift once I get settled into a schedule and a new place in the fall, I hope to resume my regular podcasting schedule.
[00:09:32] But I'm also giving myself the grace to know that this may be my last podcast for a while. It is fitting somehow because up to this point, so much of my art over the past four or five years since I really started painting has been inspired by the beaches of the San Juan Islands. This place is my inspiration.
[00:09:51] So now as I explore new landscapes and develop my art in new ways, it feels like a great episode to end on for a while as I walk out into that arena. And I know that
[00:10:03] I'm doing this by choice. It will be painful. I'm sure there will be hard things that happen. There will be blood, sweat, and tears on my part and that I'm in the arena that I choose to be in. And it's a courageous choice. I'm 58 years old after all, and. Sometimes I forget that I want to act like I'm 25 or 35, and this move to get an MFA is scary on some level, but it's also really exciting and I just wanna push myself.
[00:10:32] And while I'm in a different place, my coaching and my training metaphor Mindset Studio is still in the same place online. That's a wonderful thing about creating an online business. These days. I can travel wherever I wanna go and my business is still happening. I have clients in. Massachusetts and California.
[00:10:51] In Eastern Washington and Seattle. It's been so fun to get to know people from different areas, and I'm hoping to bring everyone together in an online community before the end of the year. So I would love to hear your input. If you are interested in getting some coaching for your art and your business, visit me@shannonborg.com.
[00:11:13] There's a little button you can click to sign up for a consultation call. And what we do is just chat about your work, chat about where you're at, and we talk through. How to approach creating a plan for you to reach your goals?
[00:11:26] I love the opportunity to share what I've learned and help other artists get to the results that they want. Whether that's having a gallery show or writing about your work, or publishing a book or teaching classes or finding new collectors, or just shifting your mindset so you really feel like the artist you want to be and working on your own creative process.
[00:11:47] All of these things are possible and all of these things are what I do in my coaching. So I would love to talk to you about your work and your process, I want to be courageous. I want my Word [00:12:00] of the year to really mean something to me this year. I want to embrace the idea that I don't know what I don't know that this whole experience will take me to places. I just have no idea what is gonna happen. It feels like a great episode to end on for a while, halfway through the year.
[00:12:16] At the threshold of a new era, so I wish you the best. Please keep in touch, and you'll hear from me as soon as I can. Plug my microphone in and start creating a new episode.
[00:12:27] thanks everyone and have a courageously creative week. Metaphor Mindset Studio. Think like an artist work like a boss.
References:
Magdalena Abakanowicz, (image above - check out her work - it is amazing)
https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/magdalena-abakanowicz/exhibition-guide
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalena_Abakanowicz
Remedios Varo, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remedios_Varo
Paul Nash, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Nash_(artist)
